About VarshaKrishi
VarshaKrishi builds affordable satellite advice for Indian smallholder farmers, the people who farm a hectare or two and for whom a missed irrigation or an unnoticed stress is a serious loss. Every week, a farmer gets one message about their own field on WhatsApp, in Marathi, Hindi or English.
What we do
We take public satellite imagery, such as Copernicus Sentinel-2, NASA HLS and Sentinel-1 radar, and turn it into a plain sentence in the farmer’s own language about what is happening in their field. Weather, soil and terrain data are used so that a message accounts for rain that is coming, not only for what the crop looked like on the last clear day.
There are two tiers. Watch is free for any field in India: a trend, the weather, and an honest “no reliable signal” when the satellite cannot tell. Decide is built crop by crop and reviewed by an agronomist, starting with Nagpur orange in Vidarbha for 2026-27.
How we try to be trustworthy
- We say when we do not know. A field with no recent clear satellite pass is shown as no reliable signal, never as healthy. Every observation carries its true age.
- Every recommendation carries its evidence. A message shows the reading and the weather behind it, with a confidence level and the sources used.
- What we told a farmer is kept. Advisory history is append-only, so we can show what was sent and when.
- Farmers can disagree with us in one tap, and those disagreements are what we use to improve.
Who it is for
Farmers use it directly. Sponsors, such as CSR teams, FPOs, processors and programmes, pay for farmer groups and get a group dashboard and a season report. Where farmers do not have a smartphone, a field team registers fields on their behalf and hands the account over later.
Where we are
The platform is in pilot. KVKs, universities and NGOs are welcome as validation and distribution partners; farmers are always the people we build for.
Founder
Tanmay Sahare, EiR Fellow, 5G/6G Centre of Excellence, FIRST, IIT Kanpur.
To talk to us, see the contact page.